These are some three of a kind examples accumulated over the years. Much thanks to my various correspondents. I ought to sort these out a bit. Many are the top three of power-laws; i.e. Hertz, Avis, Budget. Once you’ve noticed that you can use any sharp power-law to generate three. For example the three top [...]
Here’s another trio. Executive = Declarations: bring forth, generate something new, lead. Manager = Requests: please do x by time y with condition of satisfaction. Worker = Promises: deliver competent performance in a domain, over and over. I lifted that from here, but it smells like management faddism. Chasing links we get this little table: [...]
New category, groups of three. For example. Weber’s three basic legitimation’s of domination: The authority of the ‘eternal yesterday’. The authority of the extraordinary and personal gift of grace, aka charisma. The domination by virtue of ‘legality,’ e.g. rule based and professionalism. I should have started this category years ago, say when I wrote about [...]
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Every since reading Ainslie‘s “Breakdown of Will” I’ve be thinking and reading a lot about what might be called self management. I’m currenly reading “Ethics, Law and the Exercise of Self-Command.” There is a delightful quote in this essay: Social controls play a role; the Times Literary Supplement for January 22, 1982, contained a splendid [...]
If you rub two surfaces against each other they tend to smooth each other out. But, if you rub them every which way for long enough they don’t get flat. To get a flat surface you need to rub three surfaces against each other in assorted combinations. You can make optically flat surfaces this way. [...]
Wednesday, April 13, 2005
One essay in Stephen Jay Gould’s books made a deep impression on me, it was a rant about the dangers of a dialectic argument. Individuals of this species, dialectic arguments, like to join together into herds. The moment one enters the room you can expect a stampede of analogous arguments to show up soon. They [...]
Thursday, October 21, 2004
One of the dialectics in computer science is between dynamic and static typing. Dialectics are like professional wrestling. Cheap fun. But, they leads to category blindness. So let me blather a bit about a “third way” that I call diagnostic typing. At one point in my career I spent a few years deeply committed to [...]
Some people pick a question, usually in graduate school, and then spend the rest of their life puzzling out an answer to that question. Lately I’ve been reading some of Irving Janis‘ work on decesion making. The question he seems to have asked early on was “How did these smart people make those choices that [...]
There are very very few works that directly address how to control the slope of the power law curve. Clay Shirky’s essay on inequality for example. Michael Porter’s list of things that keep an industry fragmented is another. Both of those enumerate tools that create niches, barriers and membranes. Each one of those tools deserves [...]
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